The Importance Of Hip Hinge – How To Bend Down With Sciatica?

Inactivity and lack of stretching during the day can cause us to become a bit more tight and then use our back to bend over. Instead of hinging at the hips you round and flop yourself over at the waist. This squashes down on the front of the vertebra, creating a backwards trajectory and pushing the disc out of the back. This is often why people tend to ‘injure’ themselves or relapse when doing any kind of bending activities like putting your socks or shoes on, or picking something heavy with bad form. In reality that one activity hasn’t injured you, but rather was the straw that broke the camels back so to speak, you’ve done far more damage before this point with bad habits.

With a hip hinge you keep the spine straight and makes it able to function correctly without risk of injury. You essentially rotate from the hips or you can also bend your knee to get closer to the ground. The more you do this consciously during the day, the more subconscious that activity will become in your daily life. We often lose the ability to naturally engage our core during the teenage years, so relearning this is important and is a vital part of Phase 1 rehabilitation.

Phase 2 and 3 start to challenge the core and improve your stability in these unilateral exercises as well.

The questions we answered today were:

Should your knees bend a bit when doing hip hinges?
Yes, bending them slightly gives a bit of stability and engages the muscles.

My hip is one of my biggest problems, will find out today if it’s a labral tear or not, actually have follow up with rheumatology a year after my scan, am I ok to still carrying on with things like dead bugs etc?
There’s not a lot you can do about a labral tear and you may need to adjust the angle at which you do these exercises. Providing more stability for the hip socket is going to be more helpful.